i've got myself a little sgi-o2 box purely for wanting to put linux on and learning(as well as using it as a download machine), so losing any infomation thats on the drive isn't really a consern of mine.

as i said i'm planning on using the machine to a) learn linux and b) run a bit torrent client off for downloading, i only have a 4 gig drive so my plan is to drop the files into a network storage drive.

(sorry if i'm going on a bit i'm just trying to give you as much info as possible.)

i've managed to use nero to burn me a sgi liveCD which loads fine, and a can follow the guide thought ok,
apart from when i try to extact the stage3 tar.bz2 i get a message stating,

"tar: ./usr/libexec/gcc/mips-unknown-linux-gnu/3.4.3-20050110/cc1plus: Wrote only 1024 of 10240 bytes

the thing that strikes me as strange is that when i did a fisk it showed the "/dev/sda2" as starting on "0" and ending on "1015" which seems a little small for a 4.1 gig hdd, so i guess i am either configuring it wrong or for some reason fdisk is playing up

Are you sure that tarball downloaded correctly? That error I've seen before -- usually when a tar file is truncated.

On the partitioning issue... one trick, see what df -h tells you. That should very quickly identify the partition size.
Did you try resizing the volume header at all? That sometimes works around a few of fdisk's bugs (and yes, SGI-wise, it's full of them)._________________Stuart Longland (a.k.a Redhatter, VK4MSL)
I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere...